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Język Polski
The Holocaust as a Horror. A Handful of Comments on Polish Literature during 1985–2015
Przemysław Czapliński
redakcja@holocaustresearch.pl Author BiographyPrzemysław Czapliński, full professor, 20th- and 21st-century literature historian, essayist, translator, literary critic, and co-founder of the Literary Anthropology Department of the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. Research interests: 20thand 21st-century literature history, literary sociology and anthropology, literature of late Holocaust testimonies, oral literature, and 20th-century esthetics. He has written over 10 books; recently published Resztki nowoczesności (2011) and Poruszona mapa. Wyobraźnia geograficzno-kulturowa polskiej literatury przełomu XX i XXI wieku (2016); editor and co-editor of numerous collective publications – recently: Zagłada. Współczesne problemy rozumienia i przedstawiania (2009, together with Ewa Domańska), Jaka antropologia literatury jest dzisiaj możliwa (2010, together with Anna Legeżyńska and Marcin Jaworski), and Poetyka migracji. Doświadczenie granic w polskiej literaturze przełomu XX i XXI wieku (2013, together with Renata Makarska and Marta Tomczok). Together with Łukasz Zaremba he translated James English’s book The Economy of Prestige into Polish – Ekonomia prestiżu (2012).
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4805-6471
Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań
Zagłada Żydów. Studia i Materiały, No. 12 (2016), Pages: 375-394
Submission Date: 2020-10-20Publication Date: 2016-11-30
https://doi.org/10.32927/ZZSiM.423
Abstract
The author suggests that the depictions of the Holocaust in Polish literature of 1918–2014 should be categorized as horror. From the chronological perspective, Czapliński divides those thirty years into three shorter periods: 1) the initial period (from Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah and Jan Błoński’s essay “The Poor Poles Look at the Ghetto” to Wilhelm Dichter’s and Michał Głowiński’s memoirs) was dominated by white horror, which presented Jews as ghosts demanding a place in the Polish memory; 2) during the second period (from Marek Bieńczyk’s Tworki and Jan Tomasz Gross’ Neighbors until the end of the 2010s) the horror poetics was used to reveal those principles of pre-war and occupation-period normality which helped the Germans conduct the Holocaust and which conditioned the exclusion of Jews from the Polish circle of ‘normal humanity’; 3) during the third period (from Gross’s Golden Harvest until now) Jews return as the undead, violating the rules of distance and obliging Poles to physically touch the disgusting topic of the Holocaust. The contact with the Holocaust as something abhorring becomes a condition for self-knowledge, purging, and establishment of a new imaginary community.
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